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Wired on McBride
leifbk writes "Wired has a very interesting feature article on how Darl McBride and his sidekick Mike Anderer rose to fame. Some particularly juicy parts are about Anderer: 'He's supercompetitive,' said one. 'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'" A very thorough retelling of the legend that is SCO.
Assemble an army of fainting geeks and march to Anderer's house!!!
Think about it. The whole idea of history is that the victors will tell it. The losers will be written out of it or at the very worst written into it as very bad characters.
McBride is about as bland as you get. He is the CEO of a company that produces nothing. He is fighting a movement arguably composed of nothing. He is the Don Quixote of the software world except he doesn't have half the attractiveness.
Leave him to his money, he's got plenty of it. Linux will survive this idiotic onslaught, and whatever other challenges there are to come.
Let's focus on making Linux better for all of us, rather than fighting windmills.
Good idea, eh muchacho?
I have been pwned because my
There *is* very good documentation on where the code has come from -- despite what the article says.
Sheesh.
At least this is better than your average mainstream coverage.
I'll faint if he cut his own neck, I swear!
Beware blue cats moving at
'If he knows you'll faint at the sight of blood, he'll cut himself just to watch you pass out.'
So he's like that kid from grade school who would turn his eyelids inside-out? Charming.
Anderer: Hey, look what I can do. Bleh-Bleh!
Everyone: Ewww!!!!
Unknown host pong.
I've been wired on McBride, but it made my nose bleed and I felt completely awful the next day. I'll stick to smoking crack... cheaper and less of a hangover.
That's not being competetive. That's being an ASSHOLE. What kind of pers-- I think I just answered my question.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
This story was featured by Pamela Jones on the Groklaw site here.
It's a wonderful story, and lends a *METRIC ASSLOAD* of information that gets inside why The SCO Group decided to change uniforms and start playing for the wrong team in the middle of the game. Darl's just a litigious sonofabitch who happened to find another litigious sonofabitch to help dream up this scheme whereby we try to make money off *everyone else's* ideas.
A very interesting article overall, showing that Darl was involved in many other situations before SCO where he was involved in trying to make revenue by nothing but IP violation claims and other lawsuits. It tends to focus on a lot of the linux stuff (obviously) but I find the earlier history much more interesting.
From these "humble beginnings" to intentionally thinking up ideas to patent, simply to take people to court over infringement, we can see that clearly he was the best man to pull SCO's slumping sales up with the last-resort tactic of trying to enforce some concocted IP violations. Only this time, he appears to have bitten off more than he can chew.
I'm thinking there's a very good chance we'll see history repeat itself. ;)
Blake Stowell, the Director of Public Relations for The SCO Group, told Newsforge in an email:
I think his comment should have been more like this:
"I just wanna clarify what's goin' on over here. Over in the casino, after I had those nine beers, I showed this crumpled piece of paper that read:
The three lines above are source code in our very own UNIX System V. Here are three lines from the Linux kernel:
As you can plainly see, these portions of the Linux source code are exactly identical to our UNIX System V code. All of our programmers, Bob and Jim, told me so themselves, and both of them are highly trained MCSE's. We don't appreciate that the community rejects this as evidence of wrongdoing. Linus is obviously an idiot because his coding skills don't match what Bob and Jim can do in VisualBASIC 2003."
Upon reading this post, one realizes that it closely resembles going to dinner with a buddy, asking, "How's business?" and writing it off as a business expense. Further, this post closely resembles a sandwich that appears large but, once eaten, proves unsatisfyingly small. A staid, steadfast comment, it resembles a pantomime of images.
Because this post is supposed to be about SCO, Darl McBribe / McBlackmail / McExtort / McThreaten / McLose / Mc-Go-To-Jail-Do-Not-Pass-Go-Do-Not-Collect-Two-Hu ndred-Billion-Dollars. But the meat of this post is decidedly unsatisfying: SCO is trying to play hard ball with the big boys when SCO, unfit even to be called a little boy, is barely a hole in some dead goat's ass. (See what I mean about "pantomime of images?" And that's a pretty gross image, if you ask me.)
There were all the press releases issued by SCO:
For immediate release:
Smoking Crack Operation (NASCRACK: SCO) announced legal action against Microsoft Corporation for violating SCO intellectual property. The lawsuit comes on the heels of legal action targeting IBM, all the Fortune 500 companies, the governments of two world superpowers and six third world nations, millions of computer users worldwide, and God.
"Microsoft is using underground hacker software called Linux," said SCO CEO Darl McBluff. "They are using Linux to develop operating system software, codenamed Microsoft Windows, which violates our intellectual property rights. Competition from Microsoft and other companies is eating away at our sales," McBluff said. "Die fuckers!!!"
According to an SCO spokesperson, Linux violates SCO copyrights by using code developed, trademarked, copyrighted and patented by IBM. Microsoft Windows violates SCO's self-proclaimed right to eternal, perpetually increasing profits.
Experts from the Gartner Group suggested that all users of Linux, Windows, IRIX, Plan-9, CP/M, Palm OS, OS/390, UNICOS, TOPS-20, Mac OS, DOS and OS/2 immediately pay SCO a nomin
Father of SEVEN ?
God help us!
As I and others pointed out on groklaw when this was first posted back in an OT line, this quote shows that they admit to pulling this job in the hopes of being bought out. Blepp said the same at his university interview in Germany. Definately illegal trying to extort money this way.
Happy Trails
He is bland, a braggart, and doesn't know when to shut up, but what he is trying to do (namely, the profit off of intellectual property) cannot be ignored. The wired article makes a great point on the last page: "Darl McBride is right about one thing: There's a big problem with Linux. <snip> The problem is that the free operating system created by Torvalds and his collaborators is poorly documented."
To be honest, if it wasn't going to be McBride, it would be someone else down the line that would exploit this little problem. Most open source advocates would hate to say it, but with this kind of question looming over Linux as an operating system, some bigger companies won't look at it in the same light as they would, say, Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris. It is good that, not unlike a band-aid, this is getting done now so that even the big corporations can know what most of us already do; without a question or a doubt, Linux is safe to use.
I see no windmills here, but a true dragon that needs to be slayed.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
There may indeed be a holy war raging, but SCO joined it out of desperation, not in deference to a higher calling. The very day that McBride took the job as CEO in 2002, the company, then a friendly Linux reseller known as Caldera Systems, received a delisting notice from Nasdaq - despite having done a reverse four-for-one stock split just three months before. It then spent $4 million in a stock buyback to boost the price, which left the business with less than four months' worth of cash in the bank. Caldera's Linux operation was spending $4 for every dollar in revenue it earned. McBride faced a nearly hopeless situation. One of his first moves was to change the name of the company to the SCO Group and craft a strategy to use its ownership of Unix as a legal weapon against the Linux community.
When your company is dying, change its name and start suing people. Yep, SCO is very much an influential leader in the technology industry. No wonder so many people want to use their products.
Digital IP is in such a fucked shape right now that I can actually see these idiot winning.
A few days ago a Managment friend of mine who used to be CS and I were talking about IP and patents. Suprisingly we agreed that the system is out of whack.
For example, if I built a washing mahcine that got clothes clean by rinsing them every 5 minutes I can get a patent for it. Then if he takes my design but instead of every 5 minutes his rinses every 3 minutes and also reverses the spin it is a new design and i cant sue him. Now lets go to the current digital state. If I made a program that defragmented a disk drive using algorithim x I can get a patent. Now if he dreates a defrag program that uses algothim y I can sue him and win even though our programs are as different as the two earlier washing mahcines.
Secondsun
PS:(I know a defrag program is not the best analogy but it demonstrates my point)
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
What I find curious is why a company would hire somebody with McBride's background. Suppose you're the board of what is now SCO. You've got a declining proprietary Unix business and need somebody who can turn the company around. Presumably you'd look for somebody with a combination of good management skills and the combination of technical and market knowledge to figure out what direction the company should move in. McBride has none of this. From his record it looks like he wasn't much good as a manager. IKON fired him for his M&A work, which doesn't suggest that he has good market sense. He clearly has no understanding of the technology. It looks like the only thing he did well was when he was Novell's guy in Japan. I don't see why he would be attractive for SCO unless the board planned an IP scam from the outset and wanted somebody with experience in that area. If that's the case, it isnt the case that obtaining value from their IP was McBride's idea and that they discovered the alleged infringement after he came on board.
The wired story says that the claims that Microsoft invested in SCO via Baystar are unfounded. No, they're *unproven*.
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Just to remind you, the details of SCOs claims were outed by CT magazine in AUGUST 20th 2003:
http://www.lemis.com/grog/SCO/code-comparison.h
At this point it was clear SCO claims were junk. Not least because SCO story changed repeatedly, eventually claiming it was an example of code *like* the code shown by CT but not the actual code itself.
LATER, in OCTOBER Baystar & RBC made the completely irrational investment. At this time it was clear SCO wouldn't prevail and their investiment simply kept them going.
http://news.com.com/SCO+gets+%2450+million+inve
So a claim that Baystar did it because it believed SCO would make money from the lawsuits doesn't sound plausible.
Since then we had the Opera settlement, where Microsoft paid Opera 12.75 million and a term of the deal seemed to have been that they keep the money secret (only revealed by a leak).
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+behind+$12+millio
So this seems to show that indeed Microsoft can and does hide money payments.
The Linux Show had an interesting feature this week about SCO and the Linux editor, Steve Vaughan from Eweek presented his view of Darl McBride after having met him multiple times since the whole SCO issue started. According to him, Darl McBride is an achiever, and if you can, for a second, believe in what he's doing, like he does, you will make amazed at his dedication. According to him, McBride will not give up until the last vestiges of SCO are thrown out of court. He will accept anything other than a defeat in the court. It is an interesting show to listen to, give it a shot
Warning: Invective ahead. This post is rated 'R'.
The article contains about a billion inaccuracies, but I'm hoping that at least McBride's quotes haven't been altered, or this fact for that matter: Caldera was spending $4 for every $1 it made. Think about that for a second. Redhat is making money from selling services on top of GNU/Linux. IBM is making money from selling services on top of GNU/Linux. But, Caldera is losing money.
Why is that? Could it be that Caldera's business model was boxing and and selling software through regular retail channels? Could it be that Caldera wasted a lot of development effort trying to take ownership of a product that was mostly GNU (read: industry standard) at the core by attempting to build proprietary extensions on it? I've reserved personal judgment about McBride up until this point: He's a shithead, pure and simple. No one will ever be able to convince him of that, but perhaps SCO shareholders could convince him that he's not working for fucking Microsoft, so that business model doesn't apply to his company. Attention dumbfuck McBride: Pick a business model that's profitable!
Let's imagine for a moment some other famous CEO reacted the same way when the status quo began to crumble. Let's take Andy Grove on example. When Intel was losing ground the Japanese memory manufacturers, did they fold up shop, cancel R&D, and refuse change while suing both makers and buyers or foreign memory chips? Sure they dabbled in some protectionist tactics, but eventually they just changed their focus to something that the Japanese could not readily produce cheaply in mass quantities.
I'd predicted last year that SCO's purpose was not a stock pump-and-dump scheme, but an attempt destroy open source, specifically those projects that fall under the GPL; An attack on the common infrastructure of the "enemy". The article contains, in McBride's own words, an admission of such.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
First, what MS is prompting is software licensing, not closed software. They want everyone to pay a fee to gain the privilege to use a piece of software, and in the process agree to certain things that will insure a future cash-flow. All MS wants is money in exchange for software. This was somewhat of a new idea. The software itself was the product. It was no longer part of a service. If you wanted service, that will cost extra. It extended this concept through licensing with third parties. The purchaser of a system was now entitled to no MS support. The fee only covered the use of the software. Closed source or whatever is just a means to that end. One advantage to this is that hardware, software, and services are sold separately, which creates a confusion about responsibility and minimizes support costs.
IBM, OTOH, sells services. They want to sell you the hard and soft ware as well, but they are a solutions provider. As far as I know, they always have been. Obviously back in the 70's there was no software, so they had to write it. This worked until MS told everyone that MS could provide the same service for a lesser price, which was more or less a lie, but whatever. Now IBM is just trying to make the business model work. They can put their solutions around whatever OS. They just want to sell the solutions. It turns out that the best way they can gain market-share back from MS is by supported OSS. MS really has no defense against this because they have no reputation as a service provider.
Sun is just trying to survive. The settlement is part of that survival and cannot be taken as evidence of anything. Sun has been abused as much as SCO. They have had as much technology 'misappropriated'. Unlike SCO, they are not carpet bombing the industry. They are working hard to create a competetive product.
Additionally, there are often question of why IBM did not buy out SCO. My belief is that we cannot assume they did not try. Until recently a majority of SCO stock was held by insiders, and much of the rest by institutional investors. I believe this means that it would have been very hard for IBM to just buy a block of stock at market prices, then go in and replace the board. They would have had to negotiate with the board, and one assumes that the board would have laughed at a 20 million, or even 80 million, dollar offer, which was the SCO market cap.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Summary:
McBride and Anderer are two business world vagrants that made their millions from aquisition bonuses. Neither is particularly adept at actually running a business. The SCO situation blew up in their faces. The end.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
SCO/Caldera SOLD Linux kernel under GPL, how can they resind it now?
...
The very day that McBride took the job as CEO in 2002, the company, then a friendly Linux reseller known as Caldera Systems,
I rememder seeing Caldera Linux in Compusa. (For some reason, I seem to remember reading it was based on Debian, of all distributions. Maybe I'm wrong here, tho'.) Comes in a shrink-wrap box, screenshots on the cover, manuals, cdroms, same as any other distribution. And thus , like any other distribution, has the GPL , and all the sourse code with it (presumably-- I don't have it in my possession)
What I'm getting at, is the very company in question, SCO, sold the product under those terms. So how can they now go back on it?
You could imagine a defense lawyer asking McBride in court: Is it not the case that your company sold the product 'Linux' under those very terms, the GPL? And, thus, those customers have the right, under the terms you sold it under, to copy and distribute it, with likewise GPL applying to those copies?
Am I being redundant?
THEY sold it (including the kernel and src) under GPL, so GPL has to apply. And if they didn't sell it under GPL, under what license did they sell it? And can't the kernel copyright holder sue Caldera/SCO for changing the kernel license?
it's all rediculous.
I work for a company that has Ikon printers. They use Sun Solaris as their print "controllers" that rip the data (postscript, pcl, etc) and send it to the printers.
We almost got a "TCO Box" that connects an OCe printer with native Bus & Tag (old IBM mainframe technology) to a TCP/IP network. It ran Caldera Linux. Which they're in the process of switching to Suse (though, that's not set in stone).
One interesting thing is that in the price breakdown the "Linux operating system" was $700! I asked what type it was, but never got a response. I wouldn't have known it was Caldera unless I was there to see the tech boot it up and configure it.
While I'm happy to see any company see the light of Linux, it's too bad they succumed to the dim light that Caldera turned into.
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.